UPDATE 10/25/16: If you’ve come here after reading about a petition to cancel screenings of The Red Pill, I ask you to NOT sign any such petitions. It’s just free publicity for them. Read more of my thoughts on the matter here.
Dear Cassie Jaye,
Congratulations. You surpassed your Kickstarter fundraising goal yesterday, more than two weeks before the Kickstarter campaign was scheduled to come to a close. You’ve funded the postproduction work on your long-delayed documentary on Men’s Rights activists, and then some.
But I’m not sure that the person I should be congratulating is you. Last night Paul Elam of A Voice for Men – the central subject of your film – was doing his own victory lap online. And no wonder, because he seems to be the real victor here.
In a post on his site that managed to be giddy and vindictive at once, he offered his congratulations to you, then, well, to himself. “Even though the victory goes to Ms. Jaye,” he wrote, in an awkward attempt at modesty, “I have the need to offer up some thanks.”
And then he spelled out why he thinks your “victory” is really a victory for him.
For the past six years AVFM has had mud kicked in its face by a corrupt, left-wing media. Bottom feeders like Adam Serwer, Jeff Sharlet and Mariah Blake have performed endless unscrupulous acts, directly lying to their readers in order to attack AVFM, this movement and me personally.
Their work was not just to harm me, or to damage a website but to make sure if they could that the message we carry never found its way to the larger public. Their intent was and is to paint an indelible stain on all of us so hideous that we would never be taken seriously by enough people to matter.
They have failed, and I can now predict that they have failed miserably.
In other words, Paul Elam thinks he and his friends in what he ludicrously calls the “Men’s Human Rights Movement” have bought and paid for a feature-length advertisement for them.
And it’s not hard to see why Elam – and the other manospherians who’ve rallied around your film in recent days — think this. After all, they are the ones who have rescued your film from oblivion by pouring tens of thousands of dollars into your Kickstarter.
And all it took for you to unleash this torrent of money was an interview with one of the sleaziest figures in right-wing journalism, Milo Yiannopoulos of Breitbart.
In the interview, posted on Monday, you complained that “I won’t be getting support from feminists. They want a hit piece and I won’t do that.”
There was more than a little bit of irony in the fact that you were saying this to a man infamous for his many hit pieces on so-called “Social Justice Warriors.”
You also complained about an intern on your film who, you said, “had a lot of crying attacks and emotional experiences. She claimed everything I was showing her was triggering her.”
A young feminist “triggered” and crying. This is red meat to the Breitbart crowd, and I have to assume you knew this when you told Milo this story.
To an outside observer like me, this shameful pandering looks a lot like a Hail Mary play on your part. Having failed to convince most potential funders of the film that you would present anything close to an accurate picture of the Men’s Rights movement, you told Breitbart what its readers – and the broader manosphere – wanted to hear.
And it worked. Men’s Rights activists, self-professed “Red Pillers” and other assorted antifeminists rallied around your film, and the money started flowing.
On Reddit, the moderators of the Men’s Rights subreddit “stickied” an appeal to donate to your Kickstarter to the top of their front page, urging MRAs to open their wallets in order to show skeptics that “we can take part in some actual activism and not just post stuff in here.”
Even the regulars in the violently misogynistic Red Pill subreddit agreed to help bankroll your film.
And it wasn’t just Men’s Rights and “Red Pill” Redditors who organized support for your film. One right-wing Red Pill blogger, notorious for his harassment of ideological enemies, pledged to match donations up to $10,000, describing your documentary as “the Movie SJWs Do Not Want You to See.”
Meanwhile, on her blog, AVFM’s “social media director” Andrea Hardie (an internet bully better known under her pseudonyms Janet Bloomfield and “Judgy Bitch”) not only rallied her readers around your Kickstarter but also set up a gofundme of her own, raising money in hopes that it would buy Breitbart’s Yiannopoulos a producer credit in your film. (I hope that is out of the question, even if she raises more than the paltry amount she’s raised for this purpose so far.)
And then there was Elam himself, on Twitter, calling on his followers to, in his words, “Help fund #RedPillMovie because fuck feminists!”
https://twitter.com/AVoiceForMen/status/658700057311506432
Accepting money from these people would seem to be a pretty clear violation of the principles you set forth in your own Kickstarter video, in which you declared that
in order to keep this film non-partisan, and respectfully show all sides to this debate, we won’t accept funding from organizations that inevitably have biased agendas.
Instead, you have chosen to take money from people who see your film as a chance to say “fuck you” to feminists. You have chosen to take money from the actual subjects of your film.
You are making a film about Men’s Rights Activists, funded to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars by Men’s Rights Activists. You are making a film about A Voice for Men funded in part by A Voice for Men.
Does that not trouble you at all? It should. In your interview with Breitbart, you noted that “films that support one side and act as propaganda do better than those that try to have an honest look.”
You said this, presumably, to set yourself apart from such propagandists. Now you seem to have cast your lot in with them.
Which I suppose makes sense, since the clips of your film that you’ve posted online so far look a lot more like propaganda than they do like any sort of honest look at the Men’s Rights movement,
I felt uneasy about your project from the start, concerned that you had been pulled in by the soothing but misleading rhetoric that MRAs spout when they are trying to sound more respectable than they really are, rather than on what MRAs actually say and do when the cameras are off of them.
But I knew you had a good reputation as a filmmaker, and heard good things from several feminists who knew you better than I did. So I held my tongue and tried my best to give you the benefit of the doubt, even when you posted clips from your film that portrayed AVFMers as heroic underdogs rather than the misogynists and malicious harassers that they really are.
When I wrote you a little over a week ago with some of my concerns, you assured me in the phone call that followed that the clips you had posted were only part of the story, that you were well aware that the MRAs you had interviewed were on their best behavior when talking to you, and that the real story of the Men’s Rights movement is far less rosy-hued. Against my better judgement, I continued to hold on to some kind of hope that you would live up to your reputation in the end.
And now, frankly, I feel like I’ve been played.
Unfortunately, it looks like you have been played too, much more spectacularly than I have. I suspect you are doing far more damage to your reputation than you even know.
One thing I have learned in five years of watching, and writing about, and dealing with, the Men’s Rights movement, is that if Paul Elam is happy about something, that thing is almost certainly terrible.
I suspect, sadly, that you will ultimately learn this lesson yourself, the hard way.
PS: In our phone conversation, you suggested that if you were able to fund your film, you might be able to finally film the interview with me that we originally had planned to do, but which fell through due to financial and other practical obstacles during the original filming of The Red Pill. At this point, I am sorry to say, that is completely out of the question.
You came to us. We didn’t go to you. You came in here making the argument that men suffer from oppression the same amount as women. You failed miserably to make your case. Instead of addressing anyone’s counterpoints, you have spent several days now coming back to whine about how mean we are. I don’t really feel the need to convince you of anything. Especially since you have proven that you are one of those brogressives who believe that women’s rights are valid if feminists are sufficiently deferential. You’re a dime a dozen, sweetie.
Thanks for confirming that you only believe white cishet people are “ordinary” Americans. I guess everyone else is just an other.
Oh, hey! Shappy is back!
You going to deal with the fact that you’re claiming to be pro father’s rights and yet have allied yourself with the guys who said this?
This was your very first post, Shadman, and it was hostile in tone from the start, so please spare us your fucking self-aggrandizing bullshit and virtue-signalling of the other trolls. Not to mention that this is the third nym you have posted under.
Go back to your own blog, okay? Scare up traffic for your blog elsewhere.This one is for mocking misogyny. Got it?
I like that Andy is trying to make buddies with the other trolls and being ignored.
That’s been his MO since he decided to inflict his presence on us.
John Devalle:
Wow! I hadn’t realised you were that John!
http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/030/654/1219083271992.png
Suddenly your ramblings still don’t support the case you are trying to make.
Dandy Andy Shapman, don’t you have custody of your kids over the weekend any more? Why are you wasting these precious hours that could be spent with them, pissing and moaning here?
Does anybody need more popcorn? Cookies? Drinks?
@ sinkable
Ne inquiet pas mignon, C’est pas grand chose. Je suis moitie’ Irlandais et moitie’ Francais (a la cote du mon maman). Donc je suis bilingue. C’est pas une casse tete. C’est pas complique’ du tout. C’est tout normal pour beaucoup du monde.
But you’re 100% troll, Jerry.
And quit fucking up the layout of the page, you lazy shit.
@WWTH
You came in here making the argument that men suffer from oppression the same amount as women.
No I didn’t.
Thanks for confirming that you only believe white cishet people are “ordinary” Americans. I guess everyone else is just an other.
Do you read a message before replying? The reference to Bernie that I referred to was his criticism of Democrats, clearly with Ms Clinton being one of those he had in mind, as being concerned with winning the favour of the super rich.
@Jerry
No one doubts that you speak some French, so I’m not sure why you’re ‘splaining to a Frenchman how it’s possible for you to be bilingual. But you tried to explain French to a native speaker. And I hate to tell you (okay, I don’t), but my French grammar is atrocious and even I can find mistakes everywhere in your text. It’s not a brain teaster, sweetie.
Edit: meanwhile, my English proficiency tested in the 99th percentile and I wouldn’t know John isn’t a native English speaker had he not told me.
Yes. It would be nice if Jerry got banhammered at the same time. He’s been asked repeatedly not to reply through email and is either unwilling or unable to listen. He also doesn’t seem to read what people are actually saying to him.
@ Tizio
No Im attacking the substance not the tone. Your assertion that one of us is privileged and one oppressed is totally unsupported, as you don’t know either of us and even the most simplistic, ideologically stereotyped judgement would be impossible.
If you have real (heavier) oppression, bring it don’t waste time with minutia or totally fabricated outrages.
A trans has a right to be addressed by the pronoun s/he asks for.
Marxist feminists are one group separate from Marxists, and SJW’s are a general term to cover left identity based protesters.
You cant claim to know the relations between all men and women…This is clearly an ideological stereotype…as almost everything in our culture is invented designed and built by males, it will more often be a male explaining something technical to both a male and female audience. This is not patronising. All the encouragement to get more women into stem has failed, so this wont change soon.
If you are obsessing about micro aggressions, you have to much time on your hands….Western women are the safest in the world from violence and are just as violent as the men but police refuse to charge. And no women don’t just kill their partners because of abuse. Often they are the sole perpetrators in the relationship.
Often prestige and wages go down in female dominated areas because there are too many qualified women…Also the very best in every area are always men (chess, formula one, Maths, Physics, philosophy,) so it may also partially be a quality problem.
The assumption that people in power are only supporting their own gender isn’t supported…If there are more right handed people at the top, the assumption that left handed people are being oppressed and discriminated against without evidence is absurd…. And yes people with worse problems get attended to first, its called prioritising or triage in a hospital.
And the cases I gave of public monies being wasted on the paranoia of feminists were minor…The Qld govt took a huge amount of the homeless budget to set up a DV court that has achieved absolutely nothing and even the Female premier has made comments about making sure money wasn’t being wasted on feminist pushed projects.
Honestly, I support banning any muffuga who necros this goddamn thread one more goddamn time
Congrats, you can type in French. You still can’t make a point.
@Jerry
This is a logical fallacy known as a false equivalence
So, do you have a point in that mass of convoluted text you posted @Tizio, or are you still being disingenuous?
I believe that what you have done there is known as a “Gish Gallop”, where, if you can’t get us to accept your point, you just make a whole bunch of them, then claim, “Well, you didn’t disprove ‘X'”, so the rest of our reasoning is invalid.
That is an extremely disingenuous method of debate.
Also… NOBODY came here for a debate but you. You’ve decided I must debate you, while you either fail to follow debate logic, or actively attempt to subvert logic by assuming a contradiction, and running from there.
If one happens to accept that “A And Not A” is true, then any logic based on that assumption is faulty.
In this “A” appears to be “The Patriarchy Exists”, and in your head it doesn’t, but in reality it does. That’s the basic contradiction in your logic. From that inherent contradiction, almost any illogic can be deduced, and any argument based on that logic is meaningless.
This is from basic Linear Algebra and Boolean Logic.
Start from contradiction, and you can’t even begin to be logical.
OK, my previous 2 posts should be below Jerry’s 2 posts (1 ‘splaining bilingualism in French, and 1 in English)
@Jerry
Please stop using whatever you’re using to post these, reset your computer’s clock, or whatever it is that’s letting you post in the wrong place. Come on to the website, and post from there.
Don’t you just love it when trolls say patriarchy doesn’t exist and misogyny isn’t a big problem in our society.
Then they say shit like this
Jerry seems to lack a bit of self awareness here.
I would also think that if he possesses such a superior STEMlogical man brain, he’d be able to figure out to comment correctly.
What the fuck is a cultural marxist? No really Jerry. For someone who drones on about substance the are labels that supposedly represent charscteristics. SJW? That’s only substance if you attach it to the characteristics that make it illigitimate social justice activity. Substance? Until you tell me what the fuck you are going on about this is all tone.
Marxist feminist? Why does that matter to anything here. You look like you are just mashing words that threaten you together. The relations between all men and women? Who the fuck is saying that? How about you start by posting that one. Substance? There’s nothing to follow to information about history or groups and positions, just your feelings.
Fuck that.
Also
lovehow they think merely mentioning STEM means they actually understand science, technology, engineering, or mathematics.@JS
It makes me a little embarrassed to be an engineer.
I’m currently suspecting that Jerry is about 13 or 14 years old. I’m enjoying imagining that he is also Dandy Andy’s son, trying to bond with his dad by doing dad things. Have you checked your son’s room Andy? What is he doing on the internet while you froth and flail at internet feminists?
For those who are interested, here’s the Qld government’s page on the DV court program so unsuccessful that they intend to expand its reach over the next 3 years.
http://www.courts.qld.gov.au/courts/domestic-and-family-violence-court
The linked PDF of the independent evaluation of the program shows what real balanced analysis looks like.
What good is SJW if it doesn’t connect to specific groups, positions and activism. You attach attach a social concept like Marxism to society without some work to explain the redundancy if nothing else. Substance? They are nothing more than slurs until unpacked into characteristics you lazy ass.
SJW, n.: frequently used as a slur, “hidden” as if it were just a description, which when used as such, means you may safely assume the user can be banned to improve the quality of discussion.
( Of course, not aimed at you Brony 🙂 )
Also, “left identity based protesters” is a very odd way of phrasing that. Are they perhaps talking about “Indentity-based politics” as if the right doesn’t do the exact same thing with different groups?